A/N: Based on a prompt from voguevamp on tumblr: "Dimples Queen~ "Will you be my mama?" or anything DQ or OQ set in the future really :)"
The book mentioned is "Bye Bye Baby" by Janet and Allan Ahlberg, and I really don't imagine it would be available in Storybrooke as it's English and out of print, but when I read the dialogue prompt it was all I could think about.
Dimples Queen - "Will You be my Mama?" -
They were fools, maybe, to think they had more time.
They should have thought of it before, probably, before they moved Robin and Roland unceremoniously into Regina's house like there was never any question and never another possibility, before Regina treated Roland as her own, oversaw teeth brushing and morning dressing as often as Robin did himself, took him to lunch at Granny's and knew his hugs around her midsection like he had never hugged anyone else, before Roland started school, certainly, and learned to look at other families than the 'charmingly' bohemian nature of a band of thieves squatting in the woods.
Before, above all, Roland practised his reading on a children's book Regina had never quite bought for Henry for worrying it might make their family of two seem too small.
(And before, Regina thinks, in a second of blind panic, before she was left alone, Robin out helping Charming and delayed, with such a momentously important and delicate question.)
"Will you be my Mama?" Roland asks, wobbling slightly on his toes on a footstool as he stretches up for the sink, toothpaste froth all over his chin and hand as he grins widely into the mirror and turns, jumps down to face her.
His eyes are bright, smile too, winning and brimming with charm in a way Regina has rapidly come to recognise as childish guile, and her heart beats unsteadily, and she blinks, feeling vulnerable, because what can she say to his self-assured, up-turned face, he wants her as he wants candy and ice cream, and with that superlative self-confidence of a universally loved child, he is sure of her, and she cannot bear to let him down.
(What would Robin want her to say, Marian cold in the ground and conjured as phantom and not yet quite quiet once more?)
Yes, she wants to say, of course, I already am.
What she says, instead, quite as much to her own surprise as Roland's, is "Wash that toothpaste off, please."
Roland blinks.
(Mentally Regina punches herself.)
"I said," he explains, as though she did not hear him or did not understand, and this is probably more faith than she deserves, "Will you be my Mama?"
It was probably too much to hope that this conversation wouldn't occur without Robin, and in a bathroom, and Roland overtired and covered in toothpaste froth and naked from the waist up because at this stage it is considerably more expedient to clean bedclothes to do pyjama tops afterwards.
They had hoped, the one time the topic had had a chance to come up they've been so busy lately, that it was too soon, that with Zelena's subterfuge forgotten and Roland magically returned to memories when he had never known a mother, that she might remain just beloved 'Regina' until their feet were fully set.
Regina thinks of the botched adoption talks with Henry, and swallows.
"What would it mean, to be your mama?" she asks, honestly curious and stalling for time, bent nearly double for eye height.
Roland shifts, biting his lip and sticking out his chin, and Regina feels her heart tug again, distractingly, because she loves him, and loves his father too, and Roland looks so like him at times, and Henry at this age was the same too, every question and answer inflated as divine wisdom, the supreme self-importance of the child with the answer that the adult is without, bestowed like a gift.
"You would have to love me," he proclaims, winningly, and there's so little doubt in his tiny soul that when she says, "Roland, I do," he barely hears her.
(What the love of a parent means to him, now, at any rate, she hazards a guess, means more obedience and attention than strictly emotion.)
"You would have to feed me - lots of nice things! Burgers are better than squirrels, and desserts, oo…"
She grabs a flannel and cleans his face as he speaks, saying gently, as soon as there is a flannel-aided blown raspberry of disgust in which to get a word in edgeways, "I always feed you, Roland."
"And bedtime stories! Proper ones, every night, like Daddy, and you'd have to stay till I fell asleep, and no cheating! And no picture books that are too short."
She raises slightly and holds the pyjama top aloft, intrigued at this definition of motherhood she knows for a fact Robin outsourced at least a couple nights a week for years when out on missions, and maneuvers gesticulating limbs into sleeves and pulls down till curly brown hair pops through the neck-hole, a grumble too high to really be called so when ears half-catch, and then a face appears, less excited than before, and she drops, concerned, into a crouch.
"I will read you bedtime stories, Roland, as Daddy does. I'm reading you one tonight, remember?"
Roland doesn't meet her eyes, picks at his hem and then does, suddenly, and looks away.
"You would tell people I'm your son," he mumbles, almost guiltily, "like with Henry, and, and, and, I would call you Mama, and we'd go to Granny's together, and, and, I'd be your son, and -"
The backs of Regina's eyes sting, fiercely, and her heart is warm, though she scolds herself sternly and tries to keep a straight face, and she can't help but take Roland's chin, now, because there is no room for such shyness in her sunny little new-found son, he should never have to doubt her as Henry had to, for so long.
"Roland," she says, and strokes his hair back from his face with her free hand, every molecule of her desperate for him to understand - "I love you, Roland, do you understand? I would be so proud for you to be my son."
His eyes flicker, chin still ducked but rising.
"So, so bedtime stories and ice cream and -"
He is too cunning by half, her little woodland thief.
She lifts an eyebrow - "Roland - "
He interrupts, "But you're my Mama?"
Her throat is too thick to get the words out properly but it is a ridiculous limitation and he deserves this, her heart wouldn't let her give him anything less -
"Of course."
He is almost shy as he jumps to give her a hug, a new hesitance for just a moment she has been unaccustomed to in the time they've known each other. It makes her hold him tighter, arms crossed around his small back, his arms painfully, angularly tight around her neck and nose in her collarbone, and she has hugged him a hundred times it feels like but this still feels new, a too-meaningful promise, like lifting the kicking baby Henry high in her vault and knowing they were family, freshly shampooed hair clean in her nose and pyjama top barely warmed for body heat under her fingers.
She will keep him safe, her son, Roland, with his new-made brother Henry (though she must talk to him, too), and her heart beats too-fierce with the strength of it, that he wants her as his mama and she wants him as her son, and he is in her arms, safe and loved and happy, under the harsh light of the bathroom, affectionate, ready for bed.
–
And if they read a little longer, strictly, than Regina had intended, a full half hour longer than his bedtime, in fact, well, she does not begrudge herself this. Warm bedside light spilling across a bedroom already stamped with Roland's mark, even in so short a time (not that it ever would have taken long), and Roland warm and sleep-soft cuddled to her side, leg vibrating, still, with energy she can do nothing to dispel because he woke this morning motherless and sleeps this evening a double-made son.
Another book, Roland demands, and it's this that eats the extra time, and this, this is the book she had worried might be the root, she finds, as he drags it imperiously onto her lap. A child asking everyone he meets, all his worldly belongings in tow in a tiny toddler-sized suitcase - "Will you be my mummy?" first duck then cow then grandpa then Daddy, and in the guilty part of her that frowns to wish she had been able to consult Robin first she holds it in one hand, Roland's hair combing silkily though the other, and says -
"Did you ask the ducks to be your Mama, too, Roland?"
And Roland looks up at her, brown eyes huge in the lamplight, looking younger even then he is, and shakes his head virulently 'no' and says, "Just you," almost proudly, a child's love clear upon his face.
She kisses him on the forehead and feels him vibrate with the pleasedness of it, hands burrowed to knot in the waist of her shirt, and says, "I'm glad you're my son."
(And he wiggles, jabbing her in a floating rib with his forearm, even closer.)
(Robin returned, later, and Henry gone to bed scowling slightly after Regina could not help but to tell him the same thing she told Roland, Henry preoccupied with school and slightly embarrassed by it, Regina tells him of the eventful bedtime and is relieved to see him smile.
"I didn't think he'd ask so soon," Robin says, and pulls Regina close for a hug fierce with that same feeling that allows Regina's heart, finally, to slow, her mind to stop racing, that under her roof, now, her soulmate and two sons. "I'm glad he did."
And so is she.
A moment later, Regina, regaining herself - "He wouldn't sleep for an hour past bedtime, though, he'll be troublesome in the morning."
"Well," Robin smirks, and kisses her, and smoothes her hair, "He's your son.")
(And so he is.)